The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  He peered ahead from the top of a crest, saw a white object far ahead, too fleetingly to determine what it was before the glide into the trough cut off his view.

  When they lifted again, he could not spot it. But the next time it was there again, and Junie said, “Isn’t that a little boat?”

  “I think so.”

  He took the binoculars out of the rack, couldn’t get focused on the object on the next lift, but managed a swift glimpse on the succeeding one.

  “Small open boat,” he announced.

  “Out in this!”

  The spoked wheel kept turning as the automatic pilot kept searching and correcting. The distant boat would appear first a little off the port bow, then off the starboard bow, and he realized it was dead on course. He rehearsed the procedure he would follow, lock the pilot on a new course five degrees more southerly, check the time he made the change, and then when they were opposite it, return to course by giving it ten degrees more north for the same elapsed time, then put it back on his plotted compass direction. Or were you supposed to correct just five degrees and then …

  He was reluctant to touch or change anything. He had tried some careful alterations in the rpm’s to see if she would ride easier, but succeeded only in alarming himself. At slower speed she had a tendency to fall off course. Faster, she merely made a more sickening crashing sound when she came off the crest. And he could not guess how she would react to even a minor course alteration. He decided to wait and see how close they might come to the smaller boat.

  Soon he could see it at every crest, an open boat, a power boat twenty feet long, or a little longer, with a sleek hull, windshield, white topsides, and a green-blue hull lighter in shade than the strange blue of the Stream. The high sun made bright gleams on the metal fittings, the controls, the chromed windshield frame. She appeared to be floating light and high, bow to the wind, moving with a carefree grace to the long steep passage of the swells.

  But it was dead in the water. With the glasses he saw it was equipped with two stern-drive units, both uptilted. He could not make out the name on the transom. The boat appeared to be empty. To his immediate relief, he saw that with no course alteration, it would go by on his port at least a hundred feet away. The wind and the Stream combined to drift it northwest.

  “Hadn’t we ought to do something?” Junie asked.

  “Do what? So it’s some drunk. He rigged a sea anchor and he’s sleeping it off. Or young lovers.”

  She reached quickly and pressed the air horn button on the control panel. That sound, so huge when he would make the turn from the yacht club basin into the channel, sounded frail out here. In intense annoyance, he slapped her hand away.

  “It’s a vessel in distress, isn’t it?” she demanded, her face pinched into an expression of indignant anger. “Or a derelict? Aren’t we supposed to do something? What if somebody is sick, like a heart attack?”

  “Honey, you started the Power Squadron course. You didn’t finish the Power Squadron course. I finished the Power Squadron course. I am in command of this vessel.”

  “Oh dear Jesus, Captain Bligh. I just mean …”

  “I can see that she’s dragging some kind of bow line. I’d say it was an anchor line that maybe frayed, maybe right down at the anchor ring so she’s dragging enough so the line itself keeps her bow into the wind. So some careless damn fool loses his pretty little boat. So what if we try to come about? Ever think of that? Crossways on these swells, we’ll roll everything loose, and maybe coming about we get one of the breakers just right off the corner of the stern and we broach. Then what, baby? And do you want to be the one to try to get that line with a boat hook? And what if I judge it wrong and she punches a big son of a bitch of a hole in our hull? What I’ll do is report her position, and they’ll send a helicopter out of Lauderdale, or a cutter or something.”

  “That name on it, Howard! Muñequita. Out of Brownsville, Texas?” Money-quit-ah, she pronounced it.

  “What about it?”

  “Howard, I swear I read something about that boat or heard something about that boat. Something in the news. Last week, maybe.”

  “For God’s sake, June, you always want to make some kind of a big thing out of every little thing that happens.”

  “An empty boat out here in the middle of the ocean? That’s such a little thing it’s practically nothing?”

  It was abeam of them and they both stared at it. She took the binoculars from the rack, braced herself with one arm hooked around the back of the pilot seat. “Gee, Howard, it’s a pretty little boat, it really is. Like new.”

  “I’ll go down and report it,” he said. He went down the ladderway carefully, anticipating the now-familiar movements of the HoJun. In the pilot house he checked the chronometer, figured the distance traveled, and, with his dividers, made an exact little prick mark on the penciled course line. He drew an X at that mark, then measured over to the chart border to get the exact position, latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes.

  He rehearsed exactly how he would report it on the emergency channel. But he did not want to report it. He could guess that any skipper familiar with the Stream would have taken the boat in tow without a second thought. This was supposed to be a good day for a crossing.

  “All right, Captain, why didn’t you take a look and see if anybody aboard needed help? That’s your obligation, you know.”

  “Well, I was having a little trouble myself.”

  “Indeed? What sort of trouble?”

  “I—I was losing a little pressure on the starboard engine. Anyway, we went close enough to it to be certain there wasn’t anybody aboard.”

  “Certain there was no one in the bunks below?”

  But it probably wouldn’t be like that at all. It was just a boat that had slipped its moorings somehow. And how much could they ask of you anyway?

  As he turned he saw June come scrabbling dangerously down the ladderway, clutching and lurching. She had the binoculars hung around her neck. He winced as he saw them swing and whack solidly against the hand rail. He was about to tell her exactly what they had cost when he saw the frantic expression on her face.

  “A hand! We’ve got to go back, darling! We’ve got to do something.”

  “A what? Make sense!”

  “I saw it with the glasses. It came up and held onto the edge and then it let go. A little hand. A child’s hand. We’ve got to do something.”

  Howard Prowt clambered heavily but swiftly up to the fly bridge. She was beside him when he took it out of automatic pilot. Try to get it around quickly, or ease it around? Maybe a little of both. Ease it slowly until it begins to wallow in the trough, then reverse the port engine and kick it around and gun it to get out of the way of the following wave.

  Twice he brought it almost parallel with the swells, but the alarming motion caused him to head back into the wind. He resolved to do it on the third try. He got it into the trough and when she heeled over further than he would have thought possible, and when he heard a thudding and crashing below, he ran it back up into the wind again.

  “At that distance, with both boats jumping all over the goddam ocean, you saw one hand?”

  “I did!”

  “You saw an end of a rag flap over the gunnel for a moment. Something like that.”

  “Can’t we turn around?”

  “It isn’t a case of can’t. Sure. But why crash a lot of gear around below because you’ve got that imagination of yours?”

  Suddenly she turned away from him, lurched, grabbed the rail, hunched over it and was spasmed by nausea, the sea wind whipping at her damp hair. He eased the HoJun back onto course and locked it into pilot, checked his gauges. He looked at her, at the brown hide and slender legs of his life-long wife, at the regular pulsations of nausea which shook her body, and, to his mild astonishment, felt desire for her. It was an obscure and shameful pride that at a time and place so incongruous, this notion, impossible to fulfill, should come to him. Maybe it ca
n happen from being scared, he thought, of thinking of yourself drowning and dying here in this big blue mess, and it’s a way of telling yourself you’re alive.

  When she was through, he went below to put his call in. In the main cabin the television set had fallen out of its brackets and lay face down on the carpeting. The radio set had shifted. He turned it on. It would not light up. He could not send. Then he saw where the cable had been pulled out of the chassis.

  Howard Prowt went up and told her. He looked astern, and he could not spot the drifting boat. The water was changing to a new color, to a blue that was mixed with green and gray. To the southeast he saw a southbound tanker. They were out of the Gulf Stream. The motion was easing. They were on course.

  She seemed very subdued, and he glanced sidelong at her from time to time to see how angry she was. But it was a remote expression he could not read.

  “Junie, honey, it’s only by a freak of chance we ever came close enough to that boat to see it.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I mean, we wouldn’t be expected to see it.”

  “Howard, what are you driving at?”

  “Honey, on a thing like this, there can be a lot of red tape. I mean it could get us hung up in Bimini, or maybe even having to go back and fill out a lot of reports. You understand, if I was absolutely convinced you saw what you thought you saw, wild horses couldn’t have kept me from getting to that boat.”

  “Yes, Howard.”

  “And I can’t help what happened to the transmitter.”

  “I guess not.”

  “All in all, I think the wisest course is that we forget we ever saw that boat. We wouldn’t want to spoil anything, you know, like for Kip and Selma.”

  “We wouldn’t want to spoil anything,” she said, and went over to begin a careful descent of the open ladderway.

  “Is that okay with you?” he called.

  “Is what okay?”

  “To just forget it happened?”

  “Sure. Sure,” she said and backed out of sight. A moment later her face reappeared and she said, “I busted the binoculars.”

  “Accidents will happen aboard ship. Don’t give it a second thought. I got the old ones aboard, those surplus ones.”

  Later, in calm water, he called her up to the flying bridge. When she stood beside him, he said, “Land Ho, and right on the button. Look at that range marker on shore. By God, we could damn near run that channel without taking her out of pilot.”

  “Very good, dear.”

  “Look at all the crazy colors in that water off the bar there.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Her lean hand rested atop the instrument panel. He covered it with his and said, “That’s Bimini, old lady. And bank on this—the Prowts and the Heaters are going to have one hell of a month of fun.”

  For a long time she did not answer. She slowly withdrew her hand. “It’s going to be a ball,” she said without smile or inflection. “Tell me when you want me to take a line forward.” She climbed back down to the cockpit deck.

  Howard Prowt cut off the pilot and took over manual control, cutting his speed another increment as he headed for the channel. Always, coming into harbor after a good job of navigation, he had that Horatio Hornblower feeling, grizzled and sea-tough and with a look of far places.

  He reached for that feeling, and for an anticipation of all the courses he would run, all the expertise he would bring back to Delmar Bay one month hence, but he could find neither.

  He merely felt old. And his legs felt tired. And his gut felt uneasy. And he wished he were back sitting on the bank of Heron Bayou with a cold beer in his hand, and the HoJun tied to his own dock in that tricky way he had devised all by himself.

  Damn her anyway.

  Two

  STANIKER, on an ever-lasting afternoon, fought off the dreams and the visions. There was some kind of a Thing, some tantalizing entity which kept launching them at him to see how he’d make out. That time in South America when they’d gone after those lunker trout in the mountain lake, those Indios had those light nets they could throw, float them out very pretty.

  Dreams came like the nets, something throwing them at him, floating down to lay like cobwebs across his mind. So then each time he had to pluck off every strand. There was a way to do it. You focused on some real thing, close at hand. The sheath knife, rusting with an astonishing speed. Could you measure the days by the way the rust grew? Think of the knife and you could pluck away one strand. Look at the pile of empty shells of the sea-things you had eaten, had pried off the ragged black rocks at low tide, smashed with stones, trying to save the juice to suck before eating the creature. Look at the crude sticks and poles some forgotten Bahamian fisherman had assembled long ago for rough shelter on this empty island, and at your own additions, poles above and a clumsy thatch for shade from each day’s interminable passage of the sun. Roll over, wincing at the pain of it, and lift your head and look out across the hot white glare of the sand flats of South Joulter Cay, where you had tried to stamp the big arrow and the H E L P, because all the Nassau-Miami flights passed over here, just a little bit south, not too far south. But the white dry loose sand would not take a message, and when you put it in the packed wet sand, the tide would take it away. Look out toward the channel and remember that this was a popular place for the private boats which came flocking over from Florida in May, listed attractively in the Cruising Guide, and it was just one of those weird coincidences that not one had come by. Look over where those brackish pools are, and remember the oily and stagnant taste of the water, and wonder if the fever and the dreams came from the water or from the burns. Look at the outside of the right arm and shoulder, at the outside of the right thigh and calf where the deeply tanned skin had blistered, cracked, sloughed loose, and now suppurated and stank.

  The pain of movement was a reality, as was the dull ache of the over-burdened kidneys.

  These were realities, and the way he could find his way out of the bright and senseless shifting of the dreams which kept moving him to places he had been, with people who had never been there with him, people from other places who said all the ugly things from childhood. Static reality was something he could brace against, but the changing things, the birds, the airplanes, the quick lizards, he could not tell if they were part of here or part of the cobwebs.

  When his teeth began to chatter, Staniker would hunch himself out into the sunlight. And then, brain a-boil, pull himself back into the shade. Time would slip and the sun would jump three diameters west and sometimes he would become aware of a voice and listen and hear himself talking to Crissy, talking loudly because he was sitting on the edge of her dock and she was swimming slow lengths with her face closed against all listening, all explanations.

  Several times there was Mary Jane’s voice in that tired, whining, scolding, hopeless sound; but of course she was three sea miles away and a half a mile deep, her mouth at rest at last, down in the black-green of the Tongue of the Ocean.

  The dreams came oftener, and most of the time he did not mind it, merely let them happen, and watched the colors and the changes. But then he would fight free of the strands, and find panic again, the awareness that everything had gone wrong, was continuing to go wrong, could end in a death that would make all the other parts of it meaningless.

  When the sun was low, while he was in restless sleep, a Chris-Craft out of Jacksonville came cautiously in over the harbor bar, threading the unmarked channel, a vacationing dentist leaning over the bow rail, reading the channel by the color of the water, using hand signals to guide his friend, a plumbing contractor, owner of the boat, who had the helm. It was an hour or so past low tide. The wheels boiled up sand in the slow wake. The hull was skegged for this kind of shallow-water exploration. In the gentle chop, at the shallowest point, they bumped twice against the packed sand of the bottom, then moved on into the deeper water of the natural channel close to the key, towing the little glass dinghy astern. They came arou
nd the point into still water. The engines droned. The chattering wives were aft, fixing the cocktail snacks. The men were studying the chart, inspecting the water, discussing where to anchor. One of the wives turned a transistor radio to music from a Miami station.

  These sounds awakened Staniker, and on hands and knees he crawled and looked around the edge of his shelter and saw the cruiser moving past, a hundred yards away. He pulled himself up, using his right arm in spite of the pain it caused him, and cawed at them as loudly as he could. The cruiser moved on.

  The shelter was at a high point, perhaps twenty feet above the water. He tottered down the narrow winding path, terribly afraid that if he should fall, he might not be able to get up. He came down to the narrow band of sandy beach which was covered at high tide, cupped his hands around his mouth and cawed again, his voice cracking to a contralto scream.

  He saw them staring at him. The cruiser slowed, and the man at the helm gave it a single burst from both engines in reverse to lay it dead in the water. The dinghy came up and thumped the transom. The engines were turned off. Staniker went down onto one knee and rested his fists against the sand at the water’s edge.

  “What do you want?” a man called across the stillness.

  “Staniker,” he replied. “Off the Muñeca. Burned. Sick. Help me.”

  He heard their excited jabbering, and he let his head sag and closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Soon he heard the familiar snoring sound of a Sea Gull outboard, looked up and saw the dinghy coming toward him with one man aboard. The man, making clucking sounds of dismay at his condition, helped him aboard and took him out to the cruiser. In helping him aboard, they hurt him so badly he screeched and the world tilted into grayness but came slowly back. With many instructions to each other, they helped him below and got him into a bunk.

  Time slipped again, and in the next instant he could feel the movement of the hull, hear the engines at cruising speed, identify the hull motion as a deep-water motion with a following sea off the port quarter. The cabin lights were on. A thin leathery man in his fifties, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, was staring appraisingly at him. Behind him, in the shadows, was a tall woman standing braced against the motion of the boat.